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Biography

Born and raised in New Zealand, Jenny Morton completed her PhD at the University of Otago before coming to Cambridge to take up a post-doctoral fellowship in the Department of Pharmacology. She took up her lectureship in Cambridge in 1991 when she was also elected to a Fellowship at Newnham College. She is Professor of Neurobiology at the University of Cambridge and is based in the Department of Physiology, Neuroscience and Development. She was awarded an ScD from the University of Cambridge for her research on Huntington’s disease in 2014. She is Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology. She is a Professorial Fellow at Newnham College, but still plays an active role in teaching pharmacology. She has been directing studies in medicine and veterinary medicine since 1995.

Research Interests

Her research focus is Huntington’s disease (HD), although she has an interest in all neurodegenerative diseases, especially those that cause cognitive, emotional or psychiatric decline. She has worked for many years on mouse models of HD. As well as cognitive function, her particular interests relating to HD are in the role of sleep and circadian dysfunction, and molecular mechanisms of CAG repeat instability. Most recently she has been using sheep as a large animal model for studying brain function in health and disease.